content management stuff - was -> Re: [xsl] a simple case study

[Robert Koberg <rob at koberg dot com>]

Hi Jim,

This topic interests me a great deal. I wonder if others on the list are 
interested?

We have an offering about to be released in the same general area. We 
take the approach that content should be managed and edited from a 
storyboard interface that is independant of presentaion. It is IE5.5 
Windows only (or Virtual PC or perhaps Wine??). When Mozilla gets the 
contentEditable attribute we will work to go cross platform. The content 
management part of the app can work cross platform but we choose to use 
some IE specific functionality to make a really nice GUI. This will not 
be open source, at least in the beginning, but I see it being extremely 
affordable and perhaps offering it in a "mom & pop - type" Applpication 
Service Provider model :) This would be something like US$100-250/month 
for a basic account. Or perhaps it would be best to license it??
- everything is accessible from a nice (we hope!) browser-based GUI
[basic screenshot: http://koberg.com/lsb.gif]
- wysiwyg editing (storyboard styled)
- very flexible user management
- content repositiory (no web service access yet, just CVS or download a 
ZIP)
- development, QA and certification stages in a workflow
-- the workflow is not strictly enforced unless the admin sets it that 
way, rather it serves as a guidline
--- authors edit in dev, then promote to QA (silver)
--- QA certify's each content piece
--- when all content is certified (or golden) an authorized user can 
generate a static  'certified' site (HTML, JSP, ASP, etc) using their 
own XSLT, and download everything including; generated pages, content 
XML, config XML, XSLT, CSS.

[there is more but that briefly covers the main interesting parts]

The tool is built mostly with XSLT and runs in a J2EE compliant servlet 
container. I use Saxon as the XSLT processor,  Caucho's Resin for the 
servlet container and SUN's JDK1.4. I might move to Resin's compiled 
XSLT if they can get that fixed up.

Are people interested in discussing content management issues on this 
list (if it is appropriate)? If people are intersted and this is not the 
best place, is there one?

best,
-Rob


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